Bromium is a company founded by the team behind the open source Xen hypervisor. For much of the last year, they have said little about the actual technology, talking only about the promise. The promise is all about being able to deliver systems that are secure and trustworthy by design.

It's a promise that Bromium has convinced investors to fund to the tune of $26.5 million. The startup announced its latest round of funding this week, led by Highland Capital Partners and including Intel Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Ignition Ventures.

Leveraging his team's expertise in virtualization, Bromium's technology uses a small hypervisor (the microvisor) that relies on hardware virtualization.

In typical virtualization deployments today, the hypervisor sits on bare metal and then the virtual machines are on top of that. Crosby stressed that the Bromium model is not about software isolation. In his view, that is too complicated and difficult to do as a typical PC has 100 million lines of code on it.

Instead, Bromium is applying virtualization inside of a running operating system to hardware virtualize tasks.

"The moment you do something as a user, I'll grab the task and put it into an Intel VT Isolated Context and I'll run that task hardware isolated from the rest of the system," Crosby explained. "In doing so, we create a new mode of execution which is called Access Restricted, Copy on Write."